Screaming Penguin

Over the Thanksgiving holiday my nephew expressed interest in software (games) and I spent some time teaching him some very basic Java. I was hoping that might prove useful to him and spur his interest more so that he might take some initiative on his own and learn further. He wanted to write some type of a game so I suggested we start with a "text adventure" type game. We somehow ended up at "TextFootball" (sort of a combo of the text adventure and sports games). We created a half finished thing that had prompts, accepted input, randomized play results and displayed the outcome. We got through choosing teams and locations, kickoffs, change of possession, running some plays and scoring touchdowns. We used methods to make certain things re-usable and we went over the concept of objects (though our program was fairly procedural). We did not have a chance to finish field goals, turnovers and so on. The kid seemed to enjoy it and honestly so did I. The "TextFootball" project may get finished someday, its unfinished now, but either way I think the discussions and even the partial project accomplished what we set out to do - make something ourselves and have my nephew learn how to do it. The Football thing sounded easy at first but actually gets pretty tricky, direction of ball travel, field position, change of possession, yardlines which count up to 50 and then back down, downs, so on. I think if I had to do it over again I would pick something potentially less confusing, BlackJack or Horse Racing, so on. At any rate we used the command line and Eclipse - but those are admittedly pretty confusing to try to explain at the initiation stage. After the fact I did further research and have noted a few really nice resources for "teaching" programming. Even though the existing resources are great there is also still plenty of room for a lot more in this area, especially when it comes to younger kids. There is enough room maybe to inspire a person?

• BlueJ - *VERY* impressive learning focused IDE
• Python intro
• Intro java stuff
• Starlogo - havent tried it but looks very interesting - kids or not ;)